Playing A Game Assassin's Creed Brotherhood PC

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is an iterative step along the path set forth by Assassin's Creed 2. It makes minimal improvements to the existing game formula, largely adding half-cocked new features instead; it tosses away some unneeded cruft, like subtlety, and pacing; and it continues the franchise's descent into vapid, absurd storytelling.

First, the good points. While I felt that AC2's refinements on the first game's insufficient combat system were, well, still insufficient, Brotherhood's combat just feels better. Mechanically, I think it is barely any different, but it seems like enemies simply move and attack quicker this time around. My biggest complaint about the previous games' combat was waiting around for enemies to strike and expose themselves, and this time, there is virtually no waiting. So that's a significant gain.

Although I was sated by the second game's impromptu empire-building mechanic - renovating the Villa Auditore and building up a ridiculous cash income - the shallowness, and ultimate lack of utility, of it was off-putting. The Brotherhood version may not be any more useful, but it is at least more involved; now Ezio can purchase property all throughout the city, opening shops and buying landmarks to the point of literally owning Rome.

Relatedly, one of the bullet-point features for Brotherhood is recruiting helper assassins. These guys can be used in two ways: they can be sent away on missions, alone or in groups, to earn money and find items (they can also earn experience points and level-up from these missions); or they can be called in during the main gameplay to help out, by taking out targets you can't reach, or blitzing some guards who mean to get in your way, or even en masse by showering the area with arrows. Like the villa renovations in AC2, the experience system and the lackluster missions make this come across as a half-implemented feature, even though it can be a nifty time-waster.

But this is also a nice lead-in to one of my more philosophical problems with the game -- that it all but discards the subtle, from-the-shadows angle. Although there are campaign missions that auto-fail when Ezio is detected (which is an annoyance in its own right), in general there is no need for any sort of stealthiness. Why bother setting up a distraction for the guards, then sneaking up behind them with a hidden blade, when a head-on attack with a huge sword is more effective? Between buying up the city, flooding it with assassins, and outright assaulting the Vatican in plain sight, Brotherhood shows what amounts to an open war between the Assassins and the Templars.

Granted, slowly and methodically weaving through a crowd in the first game wasn't very fun, but the idea that the Assassins operated completely out of the public eye made the setup innately interesting. Ezio's faster-paced, devil-may-care attitude about spilling blood on the streets feels like a deliberate echo of modern action games. It feels like it's let go of what should be a key tenet of the franchise. But it's clear that Ubisoft doesn't really care about what made Altair's game a unique surprise -- it's much more intent on making this series about fast-paced action, minigames, and "community" integration.

But I digress. Back to the game -- while the map is chock-full of activities to do, almost none of them feel fun or worthwhile. Between the Borgia towers, the property purchases, Lairs of Romulus, Templars, side-missions with Courtesans, Mercenaries, and Thieves, Leonardo's war machines, Subject 16 glyphs, hidden treasures, recruit missions, shop quests; there is absolutely no risk of running out of things to do in Rome. But the majority just boil down to poorly-written side missions that exercise the same few mission types, like avoiding detection, or chasing a dude, or killing a bunch of dudes.

Hell, the recruit missions don't even involve any gameplay; you just open a menu, send them on their way, and then wait 6-20 minutes until they come back. And this is where Ubisoft's mechanical direction for the series shows most clearly, with recruit missions, shop management, and the sheer amount of navigation that must be done from the map: a lot of "gameplay" is happening from a Flash menu. It's certainly a lot easier to design and implement than real gameplay, I'll give them that. But it does little to allay concerns that this is just turning more and more into a Facebook game.

Narratively, the Rome campaign is nothing if not formulaic: Ezio is ousted from the Villa, rejoins the same three factions (Courtesans/Mercenaries/Thieves) who helped him last time, does recon with each faction on a particular target, finds the Piece of Eden and tackles the Pope. It's decidedly flat for the duration, particularly in the last two chapters, when the production team realized how close their deadline was and completely cut out sections of exposition and stage-setting. At this point the game abruptly and repeatedly jumps ahead months at a time, I guess in an effort to re-associate itself with documented history.

Meanwhile, the real-world storyline in 2012 continues to be absolutely retarded -- if Uncharted is the Indiana Jones of video games, then Assassin's Creed is the National Treasure. Attempting to retcon human history as a secret society's conspiratorial ploy to pacify the public, using ancient magical artifacts from the same alien lifeforms who of course created humanity, is as eye-rollingly lazy as ever. It hardly seems fair, when other games hire actual writers, for Assassin's Creed to get away with pointing at some event in history and saying "Templars did it."

AC2 introduced the memory-fragment glyphs, which a previous Animus tester left behind in the simulation (using computer-magic or whatever), leading to wacky puzzles that ultimately unlocked a little additional story insight. The puzzles themselves were framed with these dumb little "Hey, did you know Henry Ford was a Templar?" tidbits, attempting to flesh out the Templars' influences throughout time. And Brotherhood reiterates these sequences, but, with some frequency, features people who are still alive. George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, a number of US Supreme Court justices, and many currently-relevant corporate entities (like Coca-Cola and Kraft Foods) are named as participants in the Templars' international conspiracy. More than just lazy, this kind of thing strikes me as intentionally inflammatory, and somewhat socially irresponsible; if the parties involved became aware, I wouldn't be surprised to hear about slander claims against Ubisoft.

Gosh, I wonder why Microsoft isn't implicated as a Templar puppet.

So the gameplay isn't evolving sensibly and the writing is some of the worst in the industry. Why do I keep playing these games? Because despite all my complaints, Assassin's Creed continues to be adequate. Though refinement on its core mechanics is slow, and it is gradually morphing into an entirely generic open-world action game, it works well enough (and adds enough new, albeit unfinished, features) to keep my attention for the few-hours' duration of its campaign.

And because I am actually, morbidly curious about where the 2012 story is going. I've already suffered through the setup; I want to hear the punchline.

Better than: Prototype
Not as good as: The Saboteur, Uncharted 2
I guess there's a multiplayer mode also: but who gives a shit about that?

Progress: Finished the campaign, and a few of the extra things

Rating: Meh